Imaging with free Macrium

Ich bin ein Berliner !.. that's right... i AM a jelly Doughnut ! :) rip JFK !

GRATE POST KEEP IT UP!!

kado897 said:

I think that the free version can restore to a drive that has the same capacity or greater. I don't think you can restore to a smaller drive.

You can, actually, depending on specific circumstances. Allow me to elaborate, just so there's no misunderstanding. :)

Macrium can restore any partition image to any partition that's the same or greater size than the one that was backed up. How much of the backed-up partition was actually in use at the time the image was taken is not relevant here, only the partition sizes themselves matter.

So if you have, say, a 500GB HD but the system partition is only 200GB big, and you image it and then want to restore it later, you could restore it to a 250GB harddisk without any problem. (In this case, Macrium would also optionally resize the restored partition to use the remaining 50GB on the new disk as well.)

If you want to image and restore an entire disk containing multiple partitions (assuming that the partitions indeed fill the entire disk which usually is the case), then yes, you'd need a same-size or bigger harddisk to restore to.
Unless, that is, you choose to restore only select partitions from that image.

Hope that makes it clearer. :)

It is my understanding that you do have only the partition size constraint as stated by Corazon. BUT if you replace the MBR, which is a Macrium option, then you are replacing the partition table which defines the original disks complete partition structure.

So if you are rebuilding the overall partition structure of the complete disk you form its partition structure or MBR partition table entries when you format and partition the new HDD. Then do NOT replace the MBR when reimaging or else you will overwrite the new partition table.
You will need to do a
bootrec /fixmbr
to rebuild the rest of the MBR (but not the new partition table)

At least this is my understanding.

kado897, yeah, I understand where that comes from since Windows also refers to partitions as drives. Which, in a logical sense, they are.

mjf, restoring the MBR using Macrium only overwrites the boot code (the first 446 bytes, I think? Not sure right now). It doesn't touch the partition table, so no worries there.

Edit: The MBR structure, including the partition table, is nicely illustrated here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
And I was right about the 446 bytes.

@Corazon
thanks I know the structure of the MBR but I stand corrected. Macrium doesn't just replace the partition table, it rewrites it. Windows imaging does replace it which is why it has the added constraint that you must reimage to the same partition structure. I did this exercise.
Macrium even tells you it's writing the partition table!

Here I reimaged a larger partition (left picture) with a smaller sized image and the partition size decreases (right picture). The difference is interpreted as unallocated.